Xbox spends “over a billion dollars a year” on Xbox Game Pass

Xbox spends “over a billion dollars a year” on its Xbox Game Pass subscription service.

That’s from Xbox boss Phil Spencer himself, who confirmed the eye-watering figure in an interview with Windows Central earlier this week.

“We’ve put a lot of money into the market, over a billion dollars a year supporting third-party games coming into Game Pass,” Spencer said.

“What we see in Game Pass is a service that supports all kinds of games, from the biggest games, to the unknown indie games that you didn’t know you would love until you played it.”

“Game Pass was one of the things you know that over the last five years we built, and we continue to grow. It’s on PC, it’s on cloud. It’s an important part of the Xbox console identity. And I think it will continue to be that. And we will continue to look at future ways for us to innovate across our game portfolio and our platform.”

And if you’d been clinging on to the hope that Xbox’s subscription may eventually come to other platforms, you may have to hold on a little longer, I’m afraid.

“We have no plans to bring Game Pass to PlayStation or Nintendo. It’s not in our plans,” Spencer confirmed.

“The thing I want to be focused on is how do we continue to innovate for people who’ve made the commitment to our hardware platform? And how do we continue to make sure that they feel great about their investment in what we’ve built?”

Xbox says it is “actively working” on launching a mobile store that will compete with the likes of Apple and Google.

Speaking in Sao Paulo during the CCXP comics and entertainment convention last week, Spencer said the move into the mobile market is an “important part” of the company’s strategy.

“[It’s] something we are actively working on today not only alone, but talking to other partners who’d also like to see more choice for how they can monetise on the phone,” Spencer said.